Wallace Collins

Ebony Mask / Ebony Gold Wallace Collins

Years ago, I met a friend in London I had not seen in many years. He posed a very interesting question to me. He wanted me to give him a statement on Jomo Kenyatta, who was then incarcerated as the leader of the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya. Though I did not have an answer for my friend, I kept his question in my mind. Then, years later, my wife and I decided to visit Kenya on Safari with friends, which I recount here, vividly in this book. They were like two birds set free, hoop the coop, flew away from their prison abode, caged for decades, until Februrary 1990, on that sunny day in Capetown when I saw Nelson Mandella, live on CNN Television with his wife Winnie Mandela. They strolled through the gates of pollsmore Prison, away from 37 years of incarceration by the Apartheid Regime. That experience intrigued me enough that my wife and I decided, with a group of friends, to visit South Africa and see what would happen to us as a group of African Americans; it was while there that I touched yellow, Ebony Gold, as detailed in my book.